Car Trouble

by Robert Rorke

  I shook my head and started to tremble. A wave of dizziness hit me and I leaned on my uncle’s other shoulder. My right leg was shaking.

  “Whoa, steady there.”

  “I didn’t call Mom yet. Is that guy with the surfboard still on the phone?”

  Maureen looked over my shoulder. “Oh, Jesus. I’ll get him off.”

  I handed her the leftover change the fireman gave to me. “And then I have to call Rolonda. Larry was supposed to pick her up.”

  “Who’s Rolonda?”

  Before I could tell her, a nurse came into the waiting room and asked, “Where’s the boy?”

  I gulped. Maureen took my hand.

  “Your friend, he’s gone,” she said. Just like that. She probably didn’t mean to be gruff. Partly it was her accent. She was from the West Indies. I couldn’t understand her. But I still thought she was blunt.

  I stared at her. She was chunky and short. She wore thick, aviator-style eyeglasses.

  I heard myself yelling. “What do you mean, he’s gone?”

  “He had a severe blow to the head.”

  I knew that, but I wasn’t hearing her. “You mean you couldn’t do anything? You couldn’t save him?”

  How many times had Mom and I patched Himself together after one of his collisions, applying swabs dipped in boric acid to the cuts in his face while he twitched on the bathroom floor? And when he was in Kings County, it took so many stitches, the meticulous skills of the doctors, to save him. But they did.

  This time, with a kid who never walked in calamity’s shadow, nothing could be done.

  “Nicky—” My uncle’s voice behind me.

  The nurse bowed her head. “The car was going too fast. I am sorry. Do you know if his parents are here yet?”

  I didn’t answer. They say if you get hit by a car going thirty miles an hour, you have an 80 percent chance of survival. With a car going forty, you have an 80 percent chance the other way.

  I looked up, over the nurse’s head, at the people waiting in the seats for good news or bad news. Took one last look at that guy with the surfboard, sitting now, his arms wrapped around the board between his legs like it was his last friend in the world. After that, everything was a blur. I covered my face.

  “Nicky, I’m so sorry—” Maureen said.

  “Get me out of here,” I said through my tears. “Just get me out of here.”

  Twenty-Eight

  “Come on, Nicky. Wake up.”

  Himself was sitting on the edge of my bed. I rolled over to face the wall.

  “This is a terrible thing that happened.” He shook my leg. “Are you awake yet?”

  “Leave me alone. I’m sleeping.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  I had to face him. In the dark, I could make out a short-sleeved shirt in a light color. His hair was hanging down in his eyes. He squeezed my calf under the blanket.

  “I want names.”

  That day at the beach, I didn’t know the names of Vinnie’s friends, but now I did. But it didn’t mean anything. Because they were still walking around.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Just because.”

  Rain fell outside my window, stirring up night fragrances of dirt and pollen. I hadn’t been out of the house since my uncle drove me home from the beach. I told my boss there was a death in the family and I didn’t know when I would be back. Then the phone, silent these past months, never stopped ringing. And I told the story over and over to Brian and Valerie and even Mary Zaleski until I couldn’t tell it anymore.

  Mom let me lounge around in shorts and a T-shirt, without even taking a shower until the afternoon, for the whole weekend. I took Queenie for walks, around Holy Cross and past my old school, St. Maria Goretti, as if I was trying to recover lost time. When Mom was at work, I weeded the garden, clipped the rose hips off the rosebushes, and did my chores and my sisters’, even the laundry. The tasks steadied me. I should have gone to see that stupid porno movie when Larry wanted to sneak into the Rugby on my break. I should have indulged him.

  Himself yawned and scratched his head. I thought he was going to fall back on the mattress. But he had wisdom to share. “Life’s a bitch, Nicky. And you’re finding out the hard way. You’ve got many years ahead of you. Me, I figure I’ve got about fifteen. But you’re a great kid, you know that. You’re not going to fuck it up the way I did.”

  He had never said anything like that to me. I sat up with my back against the wall. He had my attention.

  “I’m going away for a while. Your mother may have told you.”

  He eyeballed me to see if this was news to me. My face did not lie. “I’m going to figure some things out, learn some new things,” he said. “I can’t make it work anymore, Nicky. Things are gonna be rough for your mother.”

  “They already are.”

  “That’s why your mother’s gonna need a hand around here, with the house and with your sisters. So I need you to get out of bed and step up now.”

  A huge lump formed in my throat. He was beaten and he was finally admitting it. “Sure,” I said. “Whatever you need.” Then I started crying again.

  “Come on, none of that.”

  He reached out, put his heavy hand on my neck, and I was able to calm myself. “When is the wake?”

  “Tomorrow. McManus.” The funeral parlor where all the Irish Catholics were laid out, in Marine Park.

  “I want to drive you there.”

  “What?”

  “Let me take you.”

  Himself in a funeral parlor with my friends? I snapped out of my funk. “I’m sure I can get a ride, Dad. Really.”

  He cocked one eyebrow. “Goddammit, Nicky. Let your old man take you.”

  It was a done deal. We drove to McManus on Monday night, the first night of the wake, and parked around the corner on Flatbush Avenue. Dad looked spiffy, with black slip-ons, slacks, a blue shirt, and a black sport jacket. The hair: perfect after ten minutes’ preening in front of the mirror. He’d had one drink before leaving the house but any trace of alcohol was buried under the bouquet of VO5 and Old Spice. I was dressed up too, in navy trousers and a green checked shirt.

  I had never been inside one of these places and didn’t know what to expect. Dad seemed to know his way around. The walls were papered with something neutral: thin gold-and-white stripes. Viewing rooms peeled off a long hallway carpeted in dark plush green. An open coffin in an empty room caught my eye and I looked at the carpet. It wasn’t Larry’s though. I had never seen an embalmed body and I steeled myself.

  Larry was laid out in a large room with a dozen rows of cushioned chairs. I wasn’t the only kid from St. Mike’s there with a parent. The room was packed with kids whose seersucker jackets clashed with their sunburned faces; their moms and dads stood nearby, smoking their brains out.

  It was too weird, like we were starting the school year all over again when it had just ended. I spotted three couches in the back of the room, done in green brocade.

  “So how does this work?” I asked once Dad and I sat down.

  The crowd blocked the coffin from view but I did see the line of people waiting for their turn to approach it and I heard the soft sorrow of a weeping woman. That lump came back in my throat again.

  “You kneel down in front of the casket,” he said. “You say a quick Hail Mary. Or Our Father, if you like that one better. Then you walk over and express your condolences to his mother and shake his father’s hand. Make it short and sweet, because there’s somebody behind you waiting to do the same thing.”

  I nodded and wiped my moist palms on my chinos.

  “You’ll feel much better once you get it over with.”

  I scanned the line, looking for a friendly face. Then Immaculata came into the room with an older woman—maybe one of her sisters.

  “There’s my friend from the play,” I said, getting up.

  We hadn’t spoken since the accident. I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned very s
lowly toward me. I guess it still hurt, after getting knocked to the ground, or maybe it hurt more now that she was home and recovering. She smiled and touched my face. Hers was still pretty banged up—bruises, mainly, and two black eyes—but she could walk okay.

  She introduced me to her sister, Antoinette. She looked like a bouncer: tall and chunky with a blunt cut. A skunk stripe of white parted the waves of thick brown hair. She said hello tersely and took the first seat she could find.

  “This is going to be grim,” Immaculata said as we moved up the line. “But we’ve seen the worst, Nicky. We were there.”

  The coffin came into view: a gleaming gunmetal color with a pale blue lining. A sweet fragrance lingered in the air, though I did not see the stands of flowers, a profusion of them, white, yellow, and one blood-red arrangement of roses, until we were facing the bier. Two empty kneelers flanked the coffin. It was our turn to go up. Suddenly I felt like I couldn’t find my feet and halted; I thought I would stumble onto the corpse. I reached out for Immaculata’s hand and she guided me to the kneeler. I was praying—I chose the Hail Mary, it was shorter—and when I was done, I looked out of the corner of my eye. Immaculata’s head was bowed, as if she couldn’t look at the body again after that ride in the ambulance. But I raised my head and exhaled, gripping the kneeler, and I looked into the coffin. There was my friend, wearing enough pancake to mask the trauma his skull withstood when it collided with the asphalt. He was dressed in a plain black suit, white shirt, and white tie, understated in a way he never was in life. I smiled, expecting him to sit up and start singing “Kids! What’s the matter with kids today?” in that Mermanesque tenor. I would never laugh that hard again as I did the first time he sang it, at his audition.

  Immaculata tapped my elbow. I rose slowly, wiping my eyes, wishing I had a tissue. Now that I was standing in the front of the room, it seemed everyone was crying too. A man who was the spitting image of Larry, but older and jowly, took my hand and introduced himself. Steve Cahill, the father. Immaculata explained who we were, thank God; I had no words and wasn’t going to remind him we’d met briefly that one time we did Bye Bye Birdie. And then we met more people. His mother, his older brother, Pete, his sister, Jane. A blur of sad faces meeting all the people who had gravitated toward the baby in their family. More people came up to express condolences: guys who were in the school band, some of the Brothers from St. Mike’s. I backed away. Dad was standing over by a marble fireplace. Photos of Larry were displayed on a mantelpiece. He pointed to one Polaroid where Larry, dressed in a navy suit, white carnation in his lapel, folded his hands in prayer and crossed his eyes. The caption said: First Communion.

  “I can see why you liked him,” he said.

  There were family vacation shots on a lake. Birthday parties. And the baby pictures, a big kid with startled, comic-strip eyes, his mouth open, ready to give somebody some lip.

  Immaculata came up and told us she was going to sit down with her sister.

  Himself watched her walk away. “She got hit too?”

  “She was the lucky one.”

  He nodded slowly, but I could practically see the smoke coming out of his ears. If Vinnie Sorrentino walked in the door, he would be dead meat. But that wouldn’t happen. That would be the height of bad taste, right? We were heading back to our seats when someone tugged my shirtsleeve. It was Rolonda, standing next to an equally stunning, slender woman of medium height. Had to be her mother. Rolonda threw her arms around me, sobbing into my shirt. I held her close, imagining Himself’s stunned expression. I introduced her as Larry’s girlfriend and she hugged him too. “Whoa,” he said, while she clung to him.

  “Hello, I am Hetty,” said Rolonda’s mother, smiling. “My daughter’s told me all about you. Sorry to be meeting on such a sad occasion.”

  “I am too.”

  With all the commotion, I forgot to ask Rolonda how she found out, who’d told her. I certainly meant to. I just dropped the ball. So much for having the phone turned back on.

  The funeral was Wednesday morning, the burial at Holy Cross. The irony was rich. Who would have thought with all the family ghosts in that cemetery that I would actually know someone my own age buried there? I’d never cut through the fence at Cortelyou Road and walk among the dead again.

  The room was packed. We let Rolonda and her mother get in line. The couches in the back were taken; we found empty seats behind a group of guys from school telling stories about a school trip they all took together to Washington, D.C., the year before I had started at the school. It made me feel empty to know there would be no more stories. Larry had told me he wanted to drive a GTO across the country. He had wanted to go to a dude ranch. Crazy things I would never think of.

  We had been at the funeral home an hour and Himself asked me if I wanted to leave. I didn’t see Gina and I didn’t see Brian, but I didn’t feel like waiting. Besides, my head was stuffed up from all the crying. I felt like I had a sinus infection.

  The night air, sultry and thick, felt better than the smoky air inside McManus. Insects buzzed around the streetlamp bulb that shone down on the Pink Panther. We pulled out and stopped at a red light on Kings Highway. Standing at the bus stop were Rolonda and her mother. I didn’t know how long one could expect to wait for a bus at this hour, but I thought they deserved door-to-door service.

  “Hey, let’s give them a ride home.”

  Himself looked out the window. “You know where they live? I’m not driving to any—”

  “Don’t worry. She works near my school so it can’t be that far from there.”

  We pulled over to the bus stop. I rolled down the window. “Where to, ladies?”

  Rolonda stepped off the curb. “C’mon, Hetty. We’ll be here all night.”

  They sat in back and the Pink Panther traced the graceful arc of Kings Highway, heading east. Hetty gave an address in Canarsie, south of the Brooklyn Terminal Market. I leaned over the backseat and asked Rolonda her summer plans. I doubted that she was going to stay at the place where she met Larry and I was right.

  “Friday’s my last day,” she said. “I’m going to spend the summer down at my granny’s. She lives in Charleston. You ever been to South Carolina? They’ve got all these tiny islands. That’s where she lives. James Island.”

  We dropped them off in front of a two-family brick house on Remsen Avenue. “I’ll ride by before you go,” I said as they got out.

  “Sure. Come by for your last free Big Mac.”

  “Thanks for doing that,” I said when we were on the road again. “And thanks for keeping me company tonight.”

  “My pleasure.” He paused. “Let me ask you something: Your friend’s family didn’t say anything about him going out with a black girl?”

  “They grumbled, but once they met her, what could they say? I was always jealous that Larry thought to ask her out first.”

  “Jesus, Nicky, give me a break. I’m driving here.”

  I smiled and sank into the seat, feeling my spine relax. We drove back on Ralph Avenue and took a left on Church. I asked him if he was taking the Pink Panther to Florida. He laughed. “What are you, kidding me?” he said. “Your uncle and I are going to drive down and meet your grandfather in Virginia. Then I’ll go the rest of the way with him.”

  A system was in place to make sure he got there. The rest was up to him. “I’ll leave the Ford in your hands, if you don’t mind. You’ll have to move it now and then, drive it around the block, check the oil, but you know how to do that.”

  “Really?” I said, grinning. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “That’s all right. You earned it.”

  A tangle of police cars blocked the traffic at the intersection of Church and Utica. There was a commotion on the sidewalk in front of Baskin-Robbins. One of the plate-glass windows was boarded up with a huge piece of plywood. We stopped at a red light. “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Somebody got ambushed,” Dad said.

  All I could think was that tho
se kids had come back, from the night of the gun. “Can you pull over?”

  “You don’t need to be involved in any of that.”

  The light turned green and we crept through the intersection. That’s when I saw two cop cars in the middle of Utica Avenue. “I’m getting out.”

  He warned me to stay inside the car, but I already had the door open. He stopped to let me go and I ran onto the sidewalk, peering inside the empty ice cream parlor. The odors of sugar and chocolate were as familiar as my middle name. There was nobody behind the counter and the place had a strange silence, as if the night had passed without anybody ordering so much as a vanilla cone.

  “Anybody here?”

  Morty came out of the back office and stood next to the freezer. Wire-rimmed glasses were tipped halfway down his nose; he must have been doing the books. Gold chains dangled from his open nylon shirt. “We’re unofficially closed,” he said before he realized who I was. “I thought you were at a funeral.”

  “We were just driving back from the wake. What happened?”

  “They tried to rob me. I pulled a gun on them. Shot one of them in the leg.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  He was weirding me out. Who knew he was packing? Where did he keep it? Morty was the real vigilante around here.

  He smiled. “Your father’s not the only one with a gun, Nicky. I should thank him for giving me the idea to get one.” I hoped Dad was still waiting in the car. “I had the cops here and an ambulance.”

  I supposed he didn’t know the cops were still here. “Who was behind the counter?” Hoping it wasn’t Valerie. But it was. Valerie and Delmar. “He talked to the cops and went home, but she’s outside somewhere. He’ll probably quit on me after this. Say, can you work this weekend? One shift. I could use a hand.”

  His face showed a sweaty desperation. “Can I get back to you?”

  He nodded. “Deal.”

  He locked the door behind me and I went looking for Valerie. She was standing in her uniform, minus the hat, in front of the drugstore, taking in the scene and chewing her fingernails. I pushed through the throng of gawkers, like a swimmer moving toward a life raft, and tapped her on the shoulder. She seemed astonished to see me, as if I’d been gone for months, when only a week had passed since we last worked together. When we hugged, people around us whistled.